{"id":3581,"date":"2025-02-18T22:09:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-18T22:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3581"},"modified":"2025-02-25T18:13:48","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T18:13:48","slug":"casablanca-morocco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/casablanca-morocco\/","title":{"rendered":"CASABLANCA, MOROCCO"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Hot on the heels of Cadiz comes Casablanca, a place neither of us has been to before, and what a different experience it turned out to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were a little torn between taking the shuttle bus into the city or walking to the big mosque which could be seen from the ship. To be clear; the mosque is a biggie, and reputedly one of the city’s biggest tourist attractions (and very impressive inside). We opted for the shuttle bus\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The port of Casablanca is not very attractive. To be fair, they are in the process of building a new cruise terminal, and when it’s finished there’s little doubt that it’ll be a corker. Until then, however, cruise passengers are treated to what seems like endless rows of containers and cranes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The shuttle bus took us United Nations Square. I was under the impression that the drop-off point would be somewhere deeper in the heart of the city, but you could actually see the ship just down the road from the drop-off point. To say the city is sprawling would be quite the understatement. Casablanca isn’t the capital of Morocco, but it is its largest city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once off the bus, we took a quick stock of our surroundings, fired up Maps.Me and headed off in the direction of the nearest large block of green. If in doubt, head for a park\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The walk through the streets told us a lot about how it must be to be own a car in Casablanca. Roadside parking seemed chaotic and thoughtless, and not only did we see a lot of double-parking, but triple and quadruple parking too. Having said that, there appeared to be occasional men in high-viz jackets and man-bags, who we assumed were probably monitoring and organising the parking, and taking money or issuing tickets\u2026 or maybe they just like high-viz jackets in these parts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The park was large and not unpleasant. It featured some large, interesting trees that were planted in long rows, either side a series of small fountains. Other than that, there wasn’t much in the way of monuments, although there were quite a large number of people sleeping in one of the lawns. Every entrance to the park appeared to be protected by tall, heavy-duty, metal gates, many of which were locked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alongside the park is a large cathedral-like building which was never used as a cathedral, and is now empty. On our first investigation, it was locked, but just as we were about to leave, after looking around the park, we noticed that the gate was open, so we walked over and took a look inside. Its interior is truly empty; no pews or altars to be seen – although, the stained glass windows were quite pretty to look at. We got the impression, from the way the security guard by the gate appeared to be getting a dressing-down from one of the women in the building, that he was not supposed to have let us in, and the gates were being locked behind us as we left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We retraced our steps back to the shuttle drop-off point and walked on a little further, to the Medina, which we enjoyed looking around. There were a lot of stalls selling trainers, and it looked like almost every other market we’d ever been in, with narrow walkways and endless stalls. One thing we did notice was that we weren’t being hassled every few steps\u2026 they don’t like you taking photographs, though\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Casablanca invokes romantic images of a gin joint run by a bloke named Rick (and looking suspiciously like Humphrey Bogart) and thoughts of a pianist named Sam who may or may not play it again. The truth is; it’s all a bit scruffy, not in the least bit romantic, and not at all how either us had envisioned it. There is a ‘Rick’s Cafe’ by all accounts, which probably attempts to play tribute to the timelass classic in tasteless ways, although we didn’t go looking for it and wouldn’t have been that interested anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we’re ever in Casablanca again, we’ll head to the mosque\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hot on the heels of Cadiz comes Casablanca, a place neither of us has been to before, and what a different experience it turned out to be. We were a little torn between taking the shuttle bus into the city or walking to the big mosque which could be seen from the ship. To be clear; the mosque is a...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3585,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,28,38,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3581"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3581"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3588,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3581\/revisions\/3588"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peterwoolley.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}